THE OUTDOOR WRITER
SARAH RYAN is a regular writer for Trail, but from April to October she can be found in the Cairngorms National Park, where she runs ‘The Wild Walk Home’ providing mindful wild camping retreats. This winter was spent in lockdown not far from the Peak District in Sheffield with her partner, friends, a fire and a dog. (thewildwalkhome.com)
On Thursday afternoon, it started to snow. Well, sleet really, thick blobs splatting against the window and sliding wetly down to puddle on the windowsill. But if it was slushy here, on a terraced house at the bottom of a hill, that meant it would be drifting snow on the Peaks. I jammed my feet into my boots, looped the dog lead over my shoulder and drove for 15 minutes straight into a whirl of snow, fog and rock. The next day I did the same thing and the day after that, a Saturday, climbed up the north edge of Kinder Scout into knee-deep snow and a quiet, pristine wonderland.
I’ve moved to be closer to the hills twice now. First to the Trossachs between Loch Lomond and Ben Lawers, the second to split my time between the Cairngorms and Sheffield. The decision of whether to move or not is a blunt one: stay or go. It packs into one week and several boxes, which are then piled in the back of a van. But that hides a lifetime of complexity. I’m a new aunt and I want to have a good relationship with my niece, see her grow and take her on adventures in the hills. I want to spend time with my parents while we’re all fit and able. I have good, long friendships that I cherish. And there’s the money thing – the potential for earning more and being able to go on holidays to the Alps, Himalayas or Japan, is much greater in the cities down south. There is the question of whether my partner will want to come with me and what it will mean if he doesn’t. There are a lot of things tying me to the south.
But there’s also a big old rope around my heart pulling me north. When it comes down to it, I don’t want a big house. I want a view. I want to watch the mountains whiten with snow in the winter, melt to brown, burn green and turn fox-red in the autumn as the bracken breaks. I want to turn the years with the hills and become a wizened old woman, muscles made wiry by years of walking. It’s not that I don’t want other things – clearly I do. It’s just that the vivid colours of bog asphodel, sphagnum moss and striated snowy peaks are constantly tugging at my heart. In the end, something wriggly in me only settles down in the hills, and something fiery in me only lights up there. And so here I am in Sheffield, minutes from the Peak District and a few hours from my family. In the summer, I’ll go north. In the end, it wasn’t so much a decision to move as a decision to stop fighting the need to do it.